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Printing quotas

Here's the deal, I would like stop the kids here printing reams and reams of crap. 1. it's expensive 2. it's enviromently un-sound 3. if I have to remove one more picture of stone cold steve austin that's jamming a printer, I'm going to go postal.

I got to thinking about print quotas, and I need to do it without spending mondo-mulla for thirdparty stuff or moving the servers from NT to 2k (also much mulla and when the hell will I have time to do that?) and, well, I want to do it in Linux!

Slight problem there tho'. I've not got the foggiest idea how to go about it. So *bats eyelids* anyone got any info they could shove my way?

Re: Printing quotas

It would probably be easier to write a wrapper (I think that's the correct term) for the linux print command.

This wrapper would keep track of the number of times a person has printed, possibly via a ~/.print file that is simply the number of prints executed by that user.

Once it gets to a certain value, the user would no longer be able to print. Then you could set up a cron job that resets the value of ~/.print every night, or every week, or something.

What I was thinking was having Linux boxen as print servers, and have them talk to each other keeping track of who has printed what, from where, possibly tieing in with samba for user names (but I could be getting waaaaay ahead of myself there).